Sorry for the late post! If you can believe it, I’ve been sick for nearly two weeks with quite the fever – but now we’re all back on track! This weeks recap will be short as well, since both I and Teddy continued to be ill, BUT I have two new portraits and a bunch of Fred’s animations for you :)

First up, an autumn fae who will be hanging out in the desert with her friends at the Saloon:

The other portrait is that of an archaeologist. I think this is the final archaeologist for now – at least I hope we have enough by now (there’s quite a few of them already, to be honest)!

This guy is inspired by none other than Howard Carter, who was the archaeologist who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb!

And finally, Fred’s animations!! Thankfully he never caught the cold, so he’s been busy making a ton of animations for all the desert NPCs and other various odds and ends happening over there! Check these things out:

Vilya scaring Freddy and Teddy out of a slump?!

A sleeping carpenter lady…

…An archaeologist brushing through the sands…

…a dragon grabbing onto a planet (what in the world could this mean?!)…

…another archaeologist, studying a tablet of some sort…

…Ledge from the Collector’s HQ, enjoying some music…

…with none other than Sally, also from the Collector’s HQ!

Then we have a bunch of flavor animations, bringing the desert to life:

..and lastly, Vilya again, waiting impatiently for something (probably the release of the new patch):

Quite exciting, no?! The desert has more NPCs than the other most NPC-heavy area in the game (Tai Ming), and I’m pretty sure it’s the most animation-heavy area as well. We’re quite happy with the way things look this far, so hopefully you guys will like it too!

Hey guys! A bit of bad news unfortunately – we’ve been hit by a cold (or flu?) at the Pixel Ferrets office and have spent this entire week in bed with fever?! Such a crappy timing, as we were really drawing closer to finishing the desert.

HOWEVER, I DO have a little something for you, and it’s a sneak peek of the Ghost Ship!! Yes, I’ve started working on the backgrounds and what they could/will look like, and here’s a first look, if you will – basically I edited some old stuff, made a bunch of new stuff, and mashed it all together into something that would fit an old abandoned ship kind of setting:

For live decorations, we’re thinking tiny crabs, and some more scary stuff like shadows and stuff moving around! That will all fall on Fred though, and he’s still quite busy doing desert stuff (I too have some stuff remaining, mainly portraits – but I couldn’t help but start a little something on the ship since we’ll soon be diving into that stuff)!

Since we’re still recovering, it’s likely the next week’s post will shorter than usual as well, but here’s to hoping we’ll have a speedy recovery from this point! We’ll do our best to get back to work ASAP and get the desert update out there :)

Can’t have a desert with lots of enemies to beat without any rewards for actually beating them, right?! Time to get to those desert drops!

The first portrait this week features a carpet salesman, selling his wares in the Port Monnaie market area:

Not much to say about this guy, really. Here’s the finished sprite:

As we’re drawing closer to the patch and there’s still a lot of character portraits to be made, so there’s actually two more this week! This girl is an archaeologist who works in the desert – perhaps she has a tool or some book that might help you on your way?

So many characters in the desert!! Whew! This one is a carpenter, possibly the daughter of the carpenter in Evergrind City.

Unfortunately, she’s fallen asleep on the job, forgetting to mend a broken bridge– oh my.. Let’s hope you can wake her up so you don’t have to walk around the entire area to get where you wanna go!

And the closer we draw to the patch, the more tiny fixes we make! Here’s a bunch of them again, starting with adding more the rocks by this crossing, to make sure you as a player don’t get frustrated when you can’t walk over them (before it felt kind of ambiguous whether they were there to block your path or simply decorative):

Next, we decided to add a fancier door to the math caves rather than temporary spear blockades, giving the solving of a puzzle a slight more oomph as these will open:

We’ve added more decorations to the ruins as well. We wanted to give it the feel of having had a bunch of traps, many of which have already been sprung, and so we added the remnants of them:

Another portrait appears as well, this one of a caveling hanging out in the saloon:

…as well as some bonus expressions for one of the characters you’ll be talking to:

Finally, I decided to adjust the puzzle block colors slightly! Below you see the old version, which we felt were a bit too dark to properly fit with the desert background:

And here’s the new, which are much lighter and slightly more yellow, to make them blend in more:

Next up, we have another boss portrait! This one of course featuring the Solem boss you’ll face off against inside the ruins:

Since he has a gem for a face, we thought what better name for this swell guy, than Sol-Gem? Said and done:

As always, there’s a ton of minor things to add and adjust right before an update, so here’s a very mixed set of things, starting with two new expressions for one of the characters in town:

A slight edit of the first desert ruin room, where we’ve removed one of the scriptures for a small note on the wall, carved by some ancient apprentice:

In the second room of the ruins, we’ve moved down the altar for the gem so there’s enough room for the giant rock to appear behind it, as well as a more broken version of the arc that will replace the previous one once the rock has rolled into it:

The scriptures around the desert have gotten some upgrades too (or should I say downgrades), since we didn’t want the text to be readable we’ve decided to make them look torn and broken enough to justify the text not being legible:

In the math puzzle cave, I also went ahead and added those number wizard statues I mentioned before, and have since decided to upgrade the look and feel of the first cave slightly as well (more on that later):

Now we have this week’s portrait, which features a giant of a man who works in the desert mine. His name is Big Brutus, and I have a feeling he’s not someone you want to mess around with:

Now, for those math puzzles… First up, I’ve made the other two caves in this system, which was pretty straight forward after everything was completed in the first cave:

But then I thought the first one looks just too simple, especially when there’s so much sand in it, so I decided to mix things up and make a slightly more interesting background for this one. So here we have the process:

And the final version of the first room, yay:

Alright, so there was one thing remaining to do in the desert ruins, and as most of the things have been implemented by now, it’s time to get going with these puzzle blocks!

These blocks are special in the sense that you need to place them correctly according to a creation myth found within the temple, so instead of just regular blocks, they have a slightly more interesting look: